Tutorial for Easy Rename

The Scenario

Great aunt Petunia is an avid photographer, and has amassed a huge number of pictures over her life. Naturally she disdains the new fangled digital world as far as the actual photography is concerned, but she has graciously agreed to have some of her works of art transposed for display on the world wide web.

In case friends, family, or Annie Leibowitz demands to see the original, it is very important that the correct film and negative number is attached to each image for easy reference. Her long suffering husband has scanned in the first batch of required photos, from 42 films over the period 1983 to 1989 inclusive. Highlights include ‘Weekend in Bognor Regis’ and ‘A Soggy Spring Arrives’. Unfortunately the file names are useless gibberish, a sequence of numbers that mean almost nothing.

As her guru of all things WWW, you need to rename her photos so that correlation to the originals is easy. Luckily, you have access to a photo renamer that makes it a surprisingly easy task.

The Solution

1. Open RenameMaestro, and drag and drop in a set of files from one of the folders (called ‘Birthday Boy’). The first files appear in RenameMaestro like this:

scan126.jpg

scan128.jpg

scan129.jpg

scan130.jpg

scan135.jpg

...

2. Select the ‘Easy Rename’ item from the ‘Available Actions’ list. Notice how RenameMaestro immediately changes to show you a preview (of very little except some numbers you don’t recognise – don’t panic, its just a first step)!

3. Type in ‘Birthday Boy ‘ to the large text box. Notice how as you type your files are renamed – but only as a preview. You now have files which are fairly well named, but the numbers are wrong. You take the first file, and checking with the box of prints next to you, realise that it is the third negative in the 36 negative film.

4. Make sure that the ‘Use magic numbering’ option is ticked; notice how the labels of the two boxes below change from ‘From’ and ‘To’ to ‘Mid’ and ‘Limit’. Type in 3 to the ‘Mid’ box which gives RenameMaestro a base number to work with, leave the ‘Limit’ option at ‘999’ and note that the new numbers match the order of negative numbers in the original files. So negative …30 becomes …07, …35 becomes …12 and so on.

5. Press the ‘Rename!’ button. And your results are here:

Birthday Boy 03.jpg

Birthday Boy 05.jpg

Birthday Boy 06.jpg

Birthday Boy 07.jpg

Birthday Boy 12.jpg

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Thanks to your photo renamer, great aunt Petunia will be eternally grateful; her next Christmas present to you will be expensive!